The Cure for Modern Life

by Lisa Tucker

  “Wouldn’t you like to know?” she said, kissing him on the nose. Ben himself had told her several times that she should never discuss her work with him or anyone outside of her staff until it was made public. He said her ethical positions were like his research, and she had to be very careful not to do anything that could skew the results.

  When he didn’t laugh or move, she said, “Anyway, it’s a response panel. I can’t be sure until I hear the final talks tomorrow and Wednesday morning.”

  “Amelia, please. I know you’re breaking something. You always do.” He was running his left hand through his hair, the way he did when he was worried, but when she asked him what was wrong, he said he was overreacting. “I’m sorry, I know I shouldn’t have asked what you’re going to say. I just need you to tell me that it doesn’t have anything to do with a specific drug. I can’t imagine why it would. Tegabadol has nothing to do with this conference.”

  “Of course it does.” Tegabadol was the generic name for Galvenar. She was so surprised, she was sputtering. “It’s the real reason they sponsored this.”

  He shook his head. “It’s not on the WHO essential medicine list. There’s no connection.”

  She didn’t blame him for not knowing about the rest of the schedule; he’d been insanely busy with his own appearances and interviews. But she still knew he was wrong, and her voice was patient but firm. “They’ve already had four panels discussing ‘quality-of-life medicines in the developing world.’ They claim it’s an issue of ‘access’ to ‘state-of-the-art’ medicines. They want ministries of health and charities to earmark funds to pay for Galvenar.”

  He walked across the room and back, twice, before he mumbled, “Shit.”

  “What is it?” Ben never cursed, and she was suddenly very nervous. “Who were you just talking to?”

  She’d seen The Constant Gardener on DVD a few weeks earlier. Ben had been in bed next to her, engrossed in the latest issue of JBC ( The Journal of Biological Chemistry). He never watched movies or television; he just didn’t find them interesting enough. But this one must have interested him at least a little because when it was over he said that the movie was “based on a misperception about current science.” The drug company was supposedly working to get the TB formula right, but Ben said no amount of tweaking the formula would change it from a killer to a real cure; you can’t just switch out an atom or two and make a drug work; if only it were that easy. Amelia believed him, but what fascinated her was the drug company killing people to shut them up. She knew that didn’t really happen, either—right?

  The woman in the movie had gotten pregnant, too. It was an eerie connection. Amelia was seconds from panicking, sure AD had some thug call to threaten her, when Ben said it was Matthew.

  Matthew. Of course. He’d called Ben almost every night since they’d been in Paris. She felt very relieved, if a little silly.

  “Honey, I know he’s your best friend.” She put her arm around his waist. “But you know that can’t make any difference to my work.” When he didn’t respond, she said, “Matthew told you it was his drug, didn’t he? It’s not true; he just says that. It started in Palm Beach, when he—”

  “You’re wrong. Matt’s in charge of it. He has been since the trials.”

  She was surprised, but she said, “So?”

  “You can’t talk about tegabadol. You really can’t.”

  “Do you realize what you’re asking me to do?” She put her hands on his cheeks and forced him to look at her. “I know Matthew’s career could suffer, but this is a principle. This is about what we believe, everything we stand for, everything we’ve—”

  “I know.” He was blinking; he wouldn’t meet her eyes. “If it was just about Matt’s career, it would be different.”

  “What is it about, then? Who else will it hurt other than that stupid company?”

  He turned away from her.

  “Who?”

  “I’m so sorry to put you in this position.” She heard him take a breath. “But my reputation—the foundation—I don’t know how bad it would get before it was finished.” He turned around and looked at her then. His sweet face was so pained she felt tears spring to her eyes. “It’s me, Amelia.” His tone was surprised, as if he couldn’t understand how this could have happened to them. “It will hurt me.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Me, Too!

  Matthew wasn’t gloating as he flew back to Philadelphia. He loved a good gloat as much as the next guy, but he just couldn’t muster the energy.

  As expected, Tokyo had been easy to resolve. After his massive display of safety data had put the entire room into a PowerPoint coma, Dorothy Hilton had quickly finished them off while he excused himself to take an urgent call about a problem with the postmarket Galvenar trial in Jakarta. Walter agreed that Matthew had to deal with this immediately, and off he went to Indonesia, where he spent his days helping the AD statisticians untangle a screwup in the sample selection process and his nights partying with a bunch of locals and American expats. Jakarta was Matthew’s favorite city in Asia, but when he left on Saturday for Paris he was already tired and having trouble sleeping because he didn’t have his Ativan. He was in no mood for any problems in Paris, and he was very concerned that Ben had kept putting off the talk.

  Luckily, Paris had been an unqualified success. On Tuesday evening, the CEO himself called Matthew to thank him for doing an outstanding job. Walter had obviously been talking up Matthew because the (normally clueless) CEO was aware of Matthew’s excellent performance in Tokyo and Jakarta, as well as his management of several situations in Paris, including Monday afternoon, when a mob of protestors showed up outside Le Palais des Congrès determined to attract the attention of American journalists, and Matthew quickly arranged a private press conference for the journalists with the three top scientists at the conference (including the almighty Ben), after which the number of protestors dwindled to a handful. And while the CEO didn’t mention Amelia’s “sudden, unexpected” announcement on Tuesday morning that she was withdrawing from the bioethics panel, Matthew knew Walter had given him credit for that as well. Walter called it a major coup and bragged that Matthew could walk on water, ignoring all Matthew’s humble protests that he just knew where to buy the best boat.

  Despite all this, he still spent his nights in Paris tossing in jet lag hell, wondering if he should just pay the concierge to bring up a frying pan and bash him over the head. The only sleeping pills he’d been able to get his hands on were the new-generation variety, and he tried them all, including the much-hyped AD drug Restrien, but even at ten times the normal dose the only effect was an annoying hallucination that the message light on his phone was blinking. He answered the phone over and over before he realized it wasn’t real. He wanted to curse Restrien, but he knew those seven-day coupon ads had resulted in millions of prescriptions and hundreds of millions in profit. Consumers—sorry, patients —love Restrien, he thought, while flushing the pills down the toilet. Patients are never wrong. Then he laughed a hysterical laugh, which made him worry that he was on the edge of insomnia-induced psychosis.

  By the time he got on the plane to Philly, his internal clock was so screwed up that nothing made him drift off, not the almost-comfortable first-class bed, not stuffing himself with tasteless airplane food, not even the uniformly bad movies. But, as he kept reminding himself, the trip had been well worth it. Right before he boarded the plane, he’d gone online to read that day’s WSJ and discovered the very good news that Astor-Denning’s stock was once again on the rise, the only pharmaceutical company to have gained in value that quarter. The rise was attributed to several factors, not the least of which was the company’s “dazzling success” at the EU conference, where AD had managed to reposition itself as a “socially responsible citizen” of the global health community.

  Since it was the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, Matthew had already decided to skip going into the office when he got back to Philadelphia. His plane touch
ed down a little ahead of schedule, at 1:45P.M ., meaning he would get home long before the going-to-grandmas crowd snarled traffic. He turned on his cell phone and dialed voice mail. Thirty-seven messages. Not bad. He could quickly review them on the cab ride home. Deal with the bare minimum, delete the rest, and then sleep for the next four days.

  When the phone rang, the caller ID didn’t show a number, but he assumed it was Cassie. She’d said she would check in when he arrived.

  “What did you do to him?” Amelia. Oh, no. Not now. “Make him sign on to one of your Galvenar clinical trials? Use your relationship with him to confuse him into something he never meant to do? God, you are evil. I will find out what it is. Ben feels he can’t tell me. Fine. I trust him completely. I dropped out of the panel because he told me it would hurt him. That was enough. But you are another story, and I will find out what your hold on him is. I’ll find out if I have to spend the rest of my life.”

  He had to hold the phone away from his ear because she was shouting. He should have expected this; of course she was angry, but Ben wasn’t. That was the important point, as Matthew reminded himself now. Ben was still feeling grateful to Matthew for paying for the trip to the Caymans, and he’d been glad to go out for coffee with him on Tuesday afternoon, at a café on Rue de Miromesnil, hours after Amelia announced her withdrawal. Unfortunately, Ben didn’t know what Amelia had planned to say about Galvenar because he didn’t ask her. But they talked about the general situation, and Ben seemed to feel better. He even shared the stunning news that Amelia was pregnant.

  Her condition hadn’t changed her one bit. The moment Matthew heard her voice his briefcase had gained fifty pounds, and now he was rubbing his shoulder on the long walk to the escalator.

  “From now on, I’m going to take a very hard look at every damn thing you do. Every place you go, every place you send your people, every article about AD in every paper. I’ll call the journalist personally and ask if they were contacted by a source. And as soon I get home, I’m going to write an article just about you. Your career, the way you use your unfinished medical training and MCAT score from twenty years ago. I’m going to reveal how Astor-Denning picked you, a pretty-face nonscientist, to woo scientists into compromising positions. When I’m finished, it’ll be crystal clear that Matthew Connelly, MD, MBA, is no different from the cheerleader types your company uses to hand out pens to horny doctors in Kansas. That should help your alliances!”

  “Amelia, please, I’m really not up to—”

  “I’m not worried that you’ll out me. You can tell Ben that you’re being kind and he believes you, but I saw the headline that AD stock went up after I canceled. You don’t want your boss to know that you used to live with me. You don’t want anyone to know that, thanks to you, I was in the audience at Palm Beach, where all your lying spin about Galvenar started.”

  Matthew felt a migraine coming on—he didn’t have migraines, but this headache was way too painful to be ordinary—and he slumped against the wall outside baggage claim. It had never occurred to him that Amelia had been in the ballroom when he gave that speech. How did she get past security? And how did she know that NCE turned out to be Galvenar, unless she’d been scrutinizing their pipeline for years? Jesus, no wonder she was a threat to his baby. In her mind, it was all connected: Galvenar, that night in his hotel room, his infidelity, the end of what they had both hoped (yes, he really had, though he would never admit it to her now) would be a lifelong relationship.

  She was still ranting, but he was thinking about how to handle this new problem. He could call Ben again, but if he did, he was in danger of Ben confessing the whole thing. Then he’d not only lose control of the situation, but Amelia would come after him like the wrath of God for ruining her paradise.

  “Wait, Amelia. Please. You really have me all wrong.” He forced his voice to sound contrite. “I’ve done bad things in the past, no question, but I’ve changed in the last year.” He gulped. “Maybe it’s turning forty, but—”

  “Yes, Ben told me about this. Supposedly you’re starting a family, too. He said you told him, ‘I want to be the kind of person my children can respect.’ Mmm, I wonder why you didn’t mention a word of this in Grand Cayman, and why you were so vague with Ben about the details? He thinks you didn’t mention the woman’s name for fear of jinxing it. Poor Matt, he’s been lonely for so long. Ha! I think it’s time we call your bluff. Let Ben see exactly who you really are. As it happens, we’re going to be in South Jersey tomorrow, at his cousin’s house for Thanksgiving. You bring your girlfriend and I’ll bring the EPT.”

  His head was pounding, but he managed to say, “I wish we could, but we’re having dinner at our house.”

  “Okay, we’ll drop by there. Eight o’clock,” she said, and hung up.

  He pushed his palm against his left eye, which was throbbing like it was about to pop out of his skull. When he’d told Ben that bullshit about starting his own family, it was Tuesday afternoon, when he was already losing it from lack of sleep, but he’d tried to be careful. He’d made Ben promise not to share this information with anyone—and specifically not with Amelia.

  He knew full well the risk he was running here. Just a few months earlier, when he brought in a psychologist to run a training seminar for new people in his alliances group on “Winning the Trust of Skeptics”—e.g., med school professors, who were the very definition of skeptical, at least in their own minds—one of the first things the psychologist mentioned was avoiding the human tendency of “me, too.” The staff had laughed at the phrase, and Matthew had explained to her that “me, too” was an expression their industry used for a new drug that was structurally similar to another company’s blockbuster. “I gather it’s derogatory then,” she said crisply. “That’s good. It will be easier to remember in this new context.”

  She wrote on the whiteboard:

  Oh, you love golf? Me, too.

  You just sawThe Da Vinci Code? Me, too.

  Innocent-seeming responses, the psychologist said, yet both risk losing the respect of your contact. What if the doctor invites you to play golf with him? What if the professor asks what you thought of the scene where Tom Hanks chokes on a bite of sushi? In the first case, your unwillingness to meet him for golf, no matter how creative your excuses, will make him suspect you’re a liar. In the second, if you say anything about the scene, even “It was interesting,” he’ll know you’re a liar because there wasn’t a sushi scene in the movie. The client was trying to expose you, and you played right into his hand. While “me, too” happens every day in social situations, you have to train yourself not to do it with contacts. The friendlier you are with the client, the harder you will have to work to resist this natural tendency. Now, if you do play a good game of golf, fine. Or you can claim you love rare steak, too, as long as you manage to choke down the bloody meat during your client dinner. Both truth and lies are perfectly acceptable, as long as you avoid the provably false.

  Again, laughter from the staff, but the psychologist didn’t ask for an explanation. She was busy filling the whiteboard with examples of how the truth can also be provably false, because what is “true” depends heavily on the client’s perceptions. Matthew went back to his office knowing his people were in good hands. He didn’t need to hear this. He could teach this course, if he wasn’t so busy living it.

  Yet here he was now, facing exactly the kind of disaster the psychologist had warned them about.

  Hey, buddy, you and Amelia are starting a family? Me, too!

  Of course he knew that at some point he’d have to tell Ben it hadn’t worked out. His plan was to hint at a miscarriage, knowing Ben wouldn’t care enough to ask about the details. Ben hadn’t even asked who the woman was, primarily because, though he obviously hadn’t shared this part with Amelia, he’d been in the middle of his own freak-out. They were at the café and Ben was confessing that he wished Amelia hadn’t gotten pregnant, which hadn’t surprised Matthew one bit. Ben had been saying for
years that he never wanted to have children because they would take too much time away from his research.

  Meaning that Matthew obviously hadn’t done his “me, too” for the usual reason of making a connection with Ben. If he’d just wanted a connection, he would have used something much simpler and absolutely true: “You wish you could have sex without ever worrying about pregnancy? Hell, yeah! Me, too!” What Matthew was trying to do was far more complicated. Admittedly, he was attempting to soothe his own guilty conscience and, as always, he was interested in protecting his billion-dollar baby, but he was also trying to—

  Oh, what the hell. There was no point in trying to justify this. It was a stupid move, and he deserved to be sitting in the airport with his nonexistent family stabbing him in the left eye.

  If he refused Amelia’s demand, which, after all, was the reasonable response, the bitch would keep working on Ben until she convinced him it was all a lie. Losing Ben’s trust right now was absolutely out of the question. He would just have to engage his exhausted brain and think of a way to make this bullshit ring true.

  He took his bag from the carousel and headed to the taxis. After he gave the cabdriver his address, he called Cassie and asked if she was, by any chance, pregnant. When she didn’t laugh, even after he shared all the basics (leaving out the name of the scientist and his meddling girlfriend), he told her she was getting a raise. Unfortunately, she had nothing to offer for the obvious reason that there was no rational way out of this. Even if one of the women he dated would agree to play the part of his pregnant girlfriend, such a ruse would make him forever indebted to the woman, which he certainly couldn’t allow.

  The cab was racing down the Schuylkill Expressway, but it no longer made Matthew happy to be avoiding traffic. The holiday was still coming tomorrow, and no matter how many cholesterol-lowering prescriptions it generated (Walter called the whole season “Statin Claus”), Amelia would be coming to his house, too, hating his guts more than ever, waving a pregnancy test in his face.